Welcome to our second The Future is Wow roundup. As promised we scooped the internet for interesting articles on how technology changes the way we live and work. This week we were particularly impressed by an initiative by Waze. They used their data and user community to improve response time in case of emergencies. Read all about it below. Enjoy!

IoT to keep track of your supply chain

Keeping track of simple things in life, like the pizza or the toothbrush we ordered online, comes as no surprise to most of us.

Yet, this is no easy task for some of the world’s biggest companies. All too often, pharmaceutical, industrial products, and electronics companies lose track of their shipments worth millions. There are reasons galore why you shouldn’t envy those responsible for commercial supply chain tracking. Dagny Dukach sums them up pretty well in his IndustryWeek article. To cut the long story short, the solution lies in one of the most talked-about technological advancements of the last years: supply chain IoT. IoT-based systems globally track the location, condition (temperature, shock, humidity), and other key metrics of shipments for six months or more. Dive in to get the full picture.

Crowdsourcing traffic data saves lives

By now you’ve probably already used Waze to save some time in your daily commute. They pitch themselves as ‘the world’s largest community-based traffic and navigation app’. Crowdsourcing your way through traffic, so to speak. Már Másson Maack reports in TheNextWeb how Waze (owned by Google) and the European Emergency Number Association (EENA) partnered up for a year to increase road safety. They tested if user-generated traffic data could alert emergency teams faster when accidents occur. Thus saving valuable time. According to Markus Kaufman, program manager, emergencies were reported up to 30 minutes sooner than before. Take a look, it’s worth it!

Smart city: the war for the IoT platform

Tell me how you want to make your city smarter, and I’ll show you the IoT platform you are looking for. That’s more or less the message i-Scoop puts forward, referring to a recent report by ABI Research that looks at the next-generation smart city platforms. At the one end of the arena, the vendors looking for a dominant position, offering turnkey optimized and dedicated solutions. At the other end, you find players who embrace AI, blockchain, and sensor data to create generic, horizontal platforms. In the middle are the city governments increasingly looking for vendor-agnostic open-source platforms. Let the games begin!

Bring on the revolution, blockchain!

MIT Technology Review points to five industries that blockchain promises to revolutionize. By cutting out the middlemen, the energy sector opens up new ways of investing and trading. Social media and online advertising change forever once users store their personal data in a decentralized network instead of going for today’s big players. Food and agriculture: track the dinner on your plate back to its very origins. You decide who gets access to which parts of your safely stored medical record. And lastly: elections, electronic voting, and a reality check on the need of maintaining a paper trail. Read more.

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